it was not addressed in the debt ceiling. the debt ceiling should have been extended, but we need to now deal with the fundamental problem that our spending and revenues are not in line. now, we could talk about the cause of how we got here. we could talk about how the congress reduced tax revenues while we were at war, a policy that i spoke out against and voted against, but our responsibility is to figure out how we go from where we are today with budget deficits that are not sustainable to how we can bring our country into better fiscal balance. we need a balanced approach. we need an approach that looks at spending, looks at revenues, that acknowledges that job growth is first and foremost our objective. we have got to create more jobs in our economy. more people working, less people needing governmental services, more people paying tax revenues. all of that helps generate the growth in our economy. we have got to protect the middle class. the middle class has been particularly vulnerable during this slowdown in our econo